at OpenHelix

Video Tip of the Week: LongevityMap and more Human Ageing Genomic Resources

Studying illness is clearly important. We need to know what’s gone wrong to understand what good preventions and interventions might exist. But another approach is to look at cases where things went well–studying people who live a long time with generally good health could shine light on useful health strategies in other ways. So having a database devoted to the study of ageing seems like a good idea to me.

The Human Ageing Genomic Resources (HAGR) collection has been growing over the years. I found our first reference to it in 2010, but it has continued to grow and expand in new directions over the years. A new paper (noted below) described an additional component of their resource collection–LongevityMap. This curated collection of variations that have been explored that may (or may not) be associated with ageing is available from the site.

LongevityMap currently has thousands of records of variants that have been examined in the scientific literature. And I’m specifically *not* saying that the are all associated with ageing. The curation strategy of this team is to include the studies whether there were significant or not–but they collect them all for you to see and you can link through to the details and assess the information yourself.

Another key feature of the site that you should know is that despite the name–not all of the data is restricted to humans. The gene-centric features of their GenAge curated collection includes human genes and those of model organisms as well. Their AnAge set collects ageing and lifespan data on over 4000 species at this time. Another entry point is the GenDR database of genes associated with calorie restriction studies of ageing–here again the data provides model organism studies and links you to their human homologs. (I really like the ageing Matrix view they offer too.)

In this week’s video tip I take a quick tour of the main resource that I mentioned here–but over at the site there are other resources and ways to drill into the data.

So have a look at the HAGR resource collection for extensive information about the science of aging.